THE GAME OF LIFE

Conway's Game of Life at wikipedia
Conway's Game of Life applet

Artist: John Conway
Medium: Cellular automaton with 4 distinct rules

Year: 1970

John Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton, or a description an infinite grid of tiles. Each tile on this grid is a very simple computer that (i) can be either dead or alive and (ii) changes between these states based on the states of its eight neighbors. If a tile is alive, one of three things can happen: it will die of loneliness if it has only one living neighbor, it will keep living happily with two or three living neighbors, or it will die of overcrowding with more than four living neighbors. A dead tile will come to life if it has exactly three living neighbors. 

Each tile constantly carries out these simple computations on its own. But when infinite tiles are arranged in a grid, their individual computational powers converge. The tiles form a society of machines, visible to us as a grid of pixels and organized throughout an infinite space, capable of computing the answer to literally any computable problem. By arranging the tiles on a plane, the source of computational power - namely the interactions between tiles - becomes visible. Conway created a computationally powerful space and made its operation perceptible and beautiful. He revealed the spark of computation by moving the heart of the computational machine into visible space.